2015-2016 Fulbright Scholars Discuss Their Plans, Iowa City, Iowa, July 21, 2015

- [Sue Dulek] Thank you for joining us for today's presentation by Quinn Hejlik, Julia Julstrom-Agoyo, and Daniel Goering. These remarkable and accomplished Fulbright student awardees discuss their plans and assignments for the next year. My name is Sue Dulek and I'm on the board of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council and host for today's program. The ICFRC hosts programs to address topics of international interest. We thank our members and volunteers for their dues and contributions that have made this forum possible for more than three decades. I also want to acknowledge our university and community sponsors. The University of Iowa International Programs and the University of Iowa Honors Program, they contribute vital time, talent, and logistics to our organization, simply couldn't do it without the students. I also want to thank Stanley UI Foundation Support Organization for their financial support and I thank today's special financial sponsors, Burns Weston and US Bank. Our programs are made possible by financial support by these sponsors. The format will be our usual. The speakers will be introduced, followed by a question and answer period at about 12:50 and we'll have about 25 minutes for the questions and answers, certainly not enough time to ask everything but we'll do what we can. You can write your questions on the postcards that are at your tables, they will be collected. I want to remind you to silence your cell phones and any other electronic device. I also ask that if you have to leave early, do so quietly without interrupting or disturbing others. At this time I'm pleased to introduce Dr. Karen Wachsmuth the University of Iowa Fulbright Program Advisor and Associate Director International Fellowships at the University of Iowa's International Programs. Dr. Wachsmuth is a designated official Fulbright Program Advisor for the Fulbright US Student Program at the UI and she coordinates the program for the U of I undergraduate as well as graduate students. This year the University of Iowa under her guidance was awarded an all-time record high of 13 Fulbright scholarships. She will introduce each of our Fulbright scholars and also moderate the program. Please welcome Dr. Wachsmuth and these three students. - [Karen Wachsmuth] Good afternoon. I'm very happy to be here today with three of our students and that we've been asked to participate in this wonderful series with all of you. I'm going to say a few words about Fulbright at Iowa and also about the Fulbright program in general before I introduce them. So, the US Student Program is different from a number of the other programs you may be familiar with, including the Fulbright Faculty and Scholar Program. I thought I'd say a few words about the types of grants. There are two types of grants, one is the Research/Study Grant. Daniel will be going on this. This gives you a little bit of information but it is for independent study or research or graduate study or a combination of both. Or arts projects abroad. There's a wide spectrum of what you could be doing on this grant. The English Teaching Assistantship is a relatively new grant. This is what Quinn will be doing and what Julia will be doing. It was started in 2008 and at that time was not as competitive as the traditional Research/Study Grant. However now, it is at least as competitive as the Research Grant. This is for students to help teach English and culture in the classroom, so it could political science, it could be popular culture, it could be arts. More than 11,000 students applied for these programs last year, if that gives you an idea of how competitive it is. For the Research/Study Grants, these are the qualifications: high level of academic or professional achievement, leadership, language proficiency, depends on the country, and a well developed project. These students have seen these slides many times but not with their own pictures on them. The English Teaching Assistantship is a growing program with new countries every year. Malaysia is a fairly new country. It improves the students who could be either in anywhere from elementary school to university students to improve their English and their understanding of the US. Applicants teach 20 to 30 hours a week and could it be any level and it depends on the country whether or not they need to be fluent, these students, these applicants, need to be fluent in the language of the country. That's Quinn. And Julia. I just wanted to give you an idea of what the Fulbright application has looked like for these students. It has stretched over the course of an entire year or more. The top four or five categories are the things that we've taken care of, worked with them, at the University of Iowa, from designing their project, to their final submission, to the on campus interviews, mock interviews, and then my final submission of all the applications together from the University of Iowa. You can see this has been a lengthy process. Last year, that is 2014, January to the end of September. Then over the course of the rest of the academic year, students are going through the various other stages. They have to be approved by national screening committees here. They have to go through the commissions and embassies in each country and be approved and chosen by them. In Quinn's case, he was invited to interview over the phone in Russian, in some cases. And then they received their final notifications and then it's onward to their in country orientation. It's a very long process. I just want to say that in addition to the work I do as a Fulbright Program Advisor, many people have contributed to these students' success. As I wrote in a blog for the Fulbright website earlier this year, it takes a Fulbright village. Art Spezak, Director of the Honors Program is here. Carmen Berger, International Studies BA Academic Advisor. Elena Ozanskaya works with the Languages Initiatives manager. And also Ambassador and professor Ryan McMullen and also our Fulbright mentor and professor of political science, Bill Reisinger, is here today. Our Fulbright faculty mentors, et cetera. There are many people involved in this process and I want to thank all of them. Now, a few key points about these outstanding students. Quinn, who comes from a Czech family background, has never been to Russia. Although he has studied Russian for two years in addition to his Czech language and Spanish studies. He is not only a Presidential Scholar at the University of Iowa, but he is the founder and president of the Presidential Scholarship Program. He is the honors liaison for the Foreign Relations Council so you've seen him many times. What you may not know about Quinn is his passion for cats. He volunteers regularly at the shelter and is an officer of the aptly named UI PAWS, Animal Welfare Society. Quinn is thoughtful and curious, intense, but gentle in an engaging way. Ideal qualities for a Fulbright Ambassador. Our Fulbright faculty committee really pushed him during his interview last fall, speaking in Russian and in English, but he remained poised, focused, and gentlemanly. Julia has never been to Malaysia, although she studied abroad in Rwanda, has done service work in Costa Rica, Mexico, and Guatemala, and pursued her interests in helping women during a winterim class on solar energy in India. Her language background includes Spanish, French, Kinyarwanda, and Hindi. She will be given basic training in Malay as well. She has tutored other students extensively at the University of Iowa. She's also won the grand prize of the International Programs Photo and Video Contest. What you may not know about Julia is her passion for dance and music. She plays the piano, violin, and ukulele. Her soft-spoken demeanor belies a quiet determination to improve the lives of women worldwide. She will make a tremendous ambassador for the US. Both Julia and Quinn are known to you all as interns for the Foreign Relations Council. Julia has also been an intern at the Center for Human Rights. As kind of an aside, amazingly, both Julia and Quinn, even before they knew they had received the Fulbright this year, have already been mentoring this year's Fulbright applicants. That is, those people who will apply in September. They've assisted at every workshop, in some cases took over the technical application training themselves. Quinn has served as the first International Programs grant writing intern, leading open weekly sessions for other applicants during the fall semester. They already exemplify the idea of Fulbright Ambassadors. Daniel, a Presidential Graduate Research Fellow and Phi Beta Kappa member working with Tippie College of Business Associate Dean Ken Brown, has spent more than two years in Japan already, living in Hokkaido during the harsh winters, grateful for the hospitality the Japanese people provided to him, and has interned as a business consultant there in addition to working for Japanese companies in the US. He speaks fluent Japanese and has studied Latin, Spanish, and Albanian as well. He has been a scout master, church choir director, and even got an A in ballroom dancing as an undergraduate. What you may not know about Daniel is that he also published a book called Seasons Change: Mountains, Trees, Waters, and Traditional Scenery in Japan. On a personal note, Daniel spent many hours in my office last summer, working on his application. He admits to having completed 20 drafts of his Fulbright grant proposal. He even came in on the day after his wife gave birth to her third child last summer. In the fall, after submitting the final version of his application, he asked me in a slightly stunned way, am I really done? What do I do now? Daniel's flexibility, cultural savvy, and eagerness to take on today's worldwide issues of work/life balance in our 24/7 overly connected society will make an important contribution to both Japanese and American citizens. I'm extremely proud of these students. I feel grateful to have had the privilege of working with them and look forward to the great things that they will certainly accomplish in the future, both as Fulbright Ambassadors and as outstanding citizens from the University of Iowa. - [Quinn Hejlik] Well, thank you so much for that introduction. And thank you all for being here and specifically to ICFRC 'cause as Karen mentioned, I worked with the honors program as liaison to ICFRC so I'm particularly honored to be here, not just as a guest speaker but as someone who's worked with this program for about a year and a half now. So thank you. As Karen mentionedI'll be in Russia next year, teaching English to university students. My interest in Russia, and in this part of the world, Central and Eastern Europe, has had a long path. Since childhood, I've had an interest in this area and it's developed in an interesting way. The first thing, I suppose, which you may notice about my name, my last is Hejlik, it's a Czech name. My dad's family is entirely Czech. Sorry, my grandparents on that side still spoke Czech at home, actually. So that's always been part of my identity. I always thought that was really cool, I wanted to learn more about it. This increased when I was nine years old and we hosted some foreign exchange students at our house. One of them was from Slovakia, one from Poland, they actually lived with us and then there were two others that just hung around a lot, they were in the same program and one was from Ukraine and one from Serbia. You can tell on the map there, it's already developing into a pretty condensed region that I was interested in and that I got exposed to very early on. It was great having these exchange students there. It really shaped the rest of my life in a lot of ways. The experiences that they had were so different from my own. A nine-year-old kid growing up in the United States in the 90s is very different from someone growing up in Ukraine in the Soviet Union in the mid-80s. And that's the experiential difference that we had there. So it was really cool to see that and get exposed to that so early on. My academic interests didn't really kick off at this point though. I knew that I was personally interested in this but I was personally interested in a lot of different things. So throughout middle school and high school, I didn't explicitly pursue Central and Eastern European history as an academic study. Even when I got to the University of Iowa and I started majoring in history, I didn't know exactly what area I wanted to go for. Yet I was interested in lotsa different things. But my sophomore year, I sort of on a whim kind of decided to study abroad in the Czech Republic. I thought, well, ya know my ancestors are Czech, sounds like a really cool place, I heard great things about Prague, and so I applied and I went. I didn't really think about much more than that, actually. So I went there and it was fantastic and I studied Czech language, Czech culture, Czech history, Czech societies since 1989, Czech art and architecture, and that really solidified my interest in this area, in Central and Eastern Europe. I wanted to continue this after I got back and so I did, when I got back to the United States I added International Studies as a major with the Russia, Eastern European, and Central Asian track. The reason I chose Russia out of all this, because I've been talking about the Czech Republic for the most part here, so you may be wondering why I switched to Russia. The biggest reason is that I grew really interested in how the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact states interacted throughout the Cold War. This picture pretty much summarizes my interests, both the time period and the area. And also, from just a convenience standpoint, it was easier to learn Russian here than it was Czech. There's simply more Russian classes available. There's more Russian speakers in the world. So I thought that made the most sense. Then through studying this, I definitely wanted to continue this, started taking Russian language and culture, Iexcuse me, I wrote a thesis on Czech and Slovak history, specifically on how the Czechaslovak government responded to Slovak nationalism following 1968. And by that point it was pretty clear that I wanted to continue this in grad school so I was thinking, what are the best tools that I need to succeed in grad school in 20th history Soviet history. Language was the biggest one but also cultural immersion and this is where I thought the Fulbright would be absolutely perfect for this. I started applying, it's a very long process but it was definitely worth it. I was awarded, thankfully, and that's where I'll be next year is in Kaliningrad. Kaliningrad is that little oblast, the little exclave, on the Baltic. You'll notice it's not connected to mainland Russia. But that's where I'll be, I'll be at the Baltic Fishing Fleet State Academy teaching, I suppose, I don't exactly know but I suppose, navy people and fishermen. But they're going to be university students and apparently they most likely will know about elementary level English so it's going to be challenging but I think it'll be very fun. In addition to my formal teaching there I'm going to be starting a club in which we'll look at the development of American culture and American values from the 1950s to today. To do that, we're going to look at American media. So we'll look at something like The Brady Bunch for an example of a stereotypical American family and what it was supposed to be in the 1970s and then look at like Modern Family, the TV show Modern Family, to see how that's changed. And we'll do that withwe'll do that with Russian as well. And just see how the cultures compare. Lastly, for my supplemental project, which'll just be for a few hours a week, I'll be reading Russian and Soviet historians. I want to see the difference between how Soviet historians interpreted Russian history and how modern Russian historians interpret Russian histor. So that's essentially what my assignment will be. That's what I'll be doing for the next year or so. And if I have a little bit of time, I think I got a little bit, I'd like to just talk a little bit about the history of Kaliningrad. 'Cause I was a history major, I think it's really cool. You might be wondering why on earth is Kaliningrad Russian? It doesn't really look like it should be. Honestly, it hasn't been for that long. Before 1945 it was German, actually. You can see this is a map of the German Empire in 1914, before World War I. You can see in the top right there is Konigsberg which is now called Kaliningrad. That was just a purely German city, it was Prussian, Immanuel Kant was from there actually, the philosopher. So this was just a German city. World War I happened and Germany lost some territory but still controlled East Prussia which contained Konigsberg. Then World War II happens and Germany loses a lot more territory and the Soviet Union invades westward, they take over the Baltics, and including East Prussia. Those are the occupation zones after World War II. You can see Kaliningrad is the top right one what has the Soviet flag over it. The Soviet Union directly administered Kaliningrad but more importantly, what made Kaliningrad different is that they expelled most of the ethnic Germans to mainland Germany and replaced them with ethnic Russians. So in 1991, after the Soviet Union fell, the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, they had their own native populations with their own cultures and languages, they became independent, they had very strong independence movements. Kaliningrad, however, didn't. It was just full of Russians that had only been there for about 50 years. So that's why Kaliningrad is Russian. I just think it's really interesting and I'm really happy to be in a city like this in Russia where it's got such an interesting and such a recent history. But that's about all I've got, I think. Next up is Julia, so please help me welcome her. - [Julia Julstrom-Agoyo] Thank you, everyone. Thank you for having me and Karen thank you for the introduction. It's nice to be on this side of the podium after having attended so many lecture luncheons the past two years from the other side and it's really nice to see a lot of familiar faces in the audience, too. As Karen mentioned, my name is Julia-Julstrom-Agoyo. I recently graduated with a BA in International Studies and I will be going to Malaysia in January for a ten-month Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship. I wanted to give you a little bit of an overview about the country of Malaysia and I primarily just focused on what drew me most to the country after first being drawn to the Southeast Asia region. There are a lot of ethnicities and religions in Malaysia, as listed there, there's the majority which is Malay and then there's also Chinese, Indians, a smaller Indigenous group portion and then non-citizens. Many of these non-citizens are migrant workers which is common in Southeast Asia. Then the religions actually correlate to those ethnicities and so Malays were actually born Muslim and then Chinese, many are Buddhist or Christian, Indians, Hindu or Buddhist and then a lot of the Indigenous groups practice Indigenous animistic beliefs and I have a little map there with the east and west parts of Malaysia and the stars which correlate to those states that I've included and those are where past ETAs in Malaysia have been placed. I included all of those because, as I recently found out about a week ago, I won't actually know where I'm placed until my three-week orientation in January. And the capital which is Kuala Lumpur. While that's very exciting, it's also going to very much change the nature of my grant, so I'm going to talk a little bit about what I know my grant is going to be and then also what I hope it's going to be. Okay. So the grant is going to be ten months from January to November. I will placed in a public secondary school so that's a government funded school. The government has a really big push in the past few years to increase the language ability of the children to speak English. A lot of them know English but are a little nervous to speak it in their classrooms and so that's what I'm primarily helping with, making them feel more comfortable. Some of the is going to be classroom instruction and then also participating in and leading, creating, extracurricular activities which, in the language Malay, is called Some of these I'll be creating on my own which we'll get into community engagement portion and then some I will just be participating. That could be sports, dance, skits and things like that. Then another part, I think specific to the Malaysia grant, is creating English camps which are similar to summer camps here and those'll be either a weekend or a week during the school year where it's an immersive English and fun kind of program for the students. So I'll be spending at least 25 hours per week with the students and outside of that the rest of the grant is focused on community engagement which I'm very excited about. This is very subject to change but I wanted to talk about a couple issues that I know are very prevalent in Malaysia and that I hope to somehow contribute in some way to. One of those issues is deforestation. As the map on the left notes, Malaysia has the world's highest rate of deforestation and this was taken from a Google maps study from the year 2000 to 2012. It's had a 14.4 loss of the total 2000 forest cover and that's an area larger than the country of Denmark. And the primary causes of this is industrial logging, large-scale commercial oil palm plantations and agribusiness, road construction and large dams. And so that's a very big issue. Being from America, I'm not sure exactly what my place is to come and kind of try and fix their problem but I'm hoping to create a group with the students at my school and also involve community members to not only discuss these issues but start working on them. So that might look something like as simple as going out and planting trees on a Saturday and discussing not only environmental concerns in Malaysia but also in the rest of the world. Another issue that I'm hoping to also work on in Malaysia is immigration and migrant workers. As many of you probably know, there's been a huge influx in Rohingya refugees form Burma as the US calls it, Myanmar as the Myanmar government calls it, and these are Rohingya refugees that are Muslim and that's why they're persecuted in their countries and so they are not given full citizenship rights as they're seen as outsiders coming from Bangladesh and so they don't benefit from the rights that they would get such as education and employment. Lots of refugees have come in the past few decades but there's been a huge influx in the first few months of this year and then the last influx was in May of this year. The Malaysia government actually was turning away the refugees coming in from boats and so was the country of Thailand but then eventually they started accepting them and so while these refugees enjoy a lot more security in their new countries, they still face a lot of challenges, mainly still not having citizenship rights and, in some cases, they don't actually have refugee status. That is partially because of the lack of resources on the Malaysian government side and also the UNHCR and so I'm hoping that ... This is a lot more of a touchy issue and so I, of course, don't want to overstep my boundaries with the Malaysian government but I'm hoping at least to volunteer my free time if they are in a lack of resources and so if they do need help processing those new refugees, and then I would like to also take this back into that discussion group that I mentioned and talk about refugee rights and migrant worker rights in that community group, not only in Malaysia but in the rest of the country. And so basically all in all this is what I hope to work on and it could very much change from when I find out where I'm placed because I may be next to a refugee camp or not, I may be next to a heavily deforested area or not, but I think even if I'm not actively able to do everything I want to do, I can at least contribute in some way and create discussions on it to begin with. And that's about all I have, thank you. - [Daniel Goering] As Karen said, my name's Daniel. I'm a doctoral student at the business college in the Management and Organizations Department. Getting a PhD in Organizational Behavior in Human Resource Management. Uh-oh. There we go. My Fulbright study is taking a cultural concept called Ikigai and applying that to American psychology theories to address an issue that's common among American and Japanese societies which is burnout. Burnout typically is looked at in a work setting and it has three key characteristics. You feel emotionally exhausted, depersonalized from your work, and you feel a inefficacy or a lack of control in how much work you have, in how you do your work and your ability to get that work done. It's a big issue in the United States, over 40% of American workers exhibit or identify as being burned out to some degree and these figures are actually pre-global economics collapse so the numbers are probably somewhat higher than 40%. It's also an issue in Japan, so much so that the Japanese have a term called which literally means death by overwork. It's a real thing. They have another term called which means suicide by overwork. And recently courts in Japan have ruled that employers are responsible and they can pay up to a million dollars in damages to the families of victims. So that's the hope for my study. That's the content of it is looking at that problem that's a mutual problem among both American and Japanese contemporary societies. But I want to give you a brief background of the impetus of this study. About 13 years ago I was a Mormon missionary in Hokkaido, Japan and towards the end of my volunteering there, there was a gentleman who approached me in a park. Typically people avoided us. So this was shocking. And he came to us and he said, I'm hurting and I want to die. I had not been trained on how to do that and so I did the best I could and so we walked with him, we listened to him, and now I have the words to know what he was talking about, he was burned out. At the time I didn't have the know-how on the things that he was talking about. Eventually we even prayed with him and he thanked us, said that he felt better and he felt peaceful and he went away. But it's been a mystery. I don't know what happened to 'im. I hope that he found peace and happiness but I don't know. That story is important because that's the impetus behind this study, is at that moment, I realized I wasn't effective at dealing with this issue, one it's a real issue and two, I didn't know how to handle it. And so that led me to where I am today of getting a PhD and finding ways to address this real issue. And so that's the background, that's the impetus for this study. This is Mt. Fuji which is a cultural icon of Japan. To give you an idea of, to paint the picture, of how serious the issue is, at the foot of Mt. Fuji is Aokigahara Forest which has been come to known as, unfortunately, suicide forest. It's a place where people go, separate themselves from society, and they choose to end their lives there. So that's my hope is that through this study we can help address some of these issues. The way that I want to address some of these issues now that I've had doctoral training, or undergoing it, is to apply American psychology theories informed by this concept of in an effort to help solve or at least alleviate this problem of burnout. One of the theories, very briefly, is called conservation of resources. In a nutshell, it's that humans have an instinct for self-preservation and when our resources, whether those are emotional, psychological, social, what have you, are threatened or depleted, that creates the phenomenon we know as stress. For instance, heavy work loads. If those stressors are excessive and/or chronic over a long period of time, that creates burnout. Now the Japanese also have a concept of burnout and they call it burnout syndrome. One of the things that's hindered progress in this area is the fact that we call it a syndrome and that the theory is meant to predict pathology. Basically this is an issue because when you call it a syndrome, when you have a theory that's predicting pathology, you're labeling, you're acknowledging that the issue of burnout is a mental illness and that creates a stigma of just really hindered progress. Thankfully, more current psychological theories within the 21st century have addressed this issue. Positive psychology, it really is about the idea that for 100 years we've focused on diagnosing and treating pathology, why don't we develop theories to predict well being, to predict happiness, to predict thriving and flourishing. One of the key findings of positive psychology today is this idea of virtues. There's a finding by Dahlsgaard, Peterson, & Seligman 2005 that shows that are six universal virtues. When I say universal that means that they are shared across cultures and throughout time, historically. All humans, in other words, value these six virtues. Transcendence is the one at the very bottom there that informs this study the most. Psychologists have applied this-- Okay, this virtue's framework to the Army and basically they've shown that people who are, they've called it spiritual fitness, people who are more spiritually fit have lower levels of burnout, higher levels of well-being. But this comes with some risks. Namely, there's some adverse reactions among soldiers of the idea of spiritual fitness. There's HR implications here that could potentially be discriminatory. But the main question is, well what exactly is then this idea of spiritual fitness? And this is where the missing link comes into play. This idea of Ikigai Ikigai broadly means the pursuit of a life worth living and the main point of Ikigai how it informs the theory is that it's an idea of transcendence, of transcending the self but for the benefit of others, so a lot of American psychology theories, the underlying assumption is you should be virtuous so that you benefit yourself. You can see there's a paradox there if you want to be transcendent, transcend yourself for the sake of benefiting yourself. This is where Ikigai informs that theory, is that finding a life worth living for the benefit of others. So this is where my Fulbright project comes in. I'll be working with professors Kawakami and Shimazu at the University of Tokyo. They have undergone a nationwide longitudinal study for several years and they've invited me, as a University of Iowa student, to come and collaborate with them on this project to apply these theories, these American theories, informed by this concept of Ikigai to help address this mutual problem of burnout among both American and Japanese people. My main hope is, again, getting back to that story of the gentleman who stopped us in the park, is that we can help people like that man. So that's my hope for this study. - [Karen Wachsmuth] How many UI students applied for Fulbrights this past year? I can answer that question. 37 students applied for Fulbright at the University of Iowa this year. This number has doubled in the past three years and we were very lucky to have 20 of those 37 students picked as recommended candidates and what is now known as semi-finalists. Peace Corps volunteers are at times accused of being CIA agents. How will you respond to such an accusation? And this is a question for Quinn and Julia, so I don't know who wants to answer that first. - [Quinn Hejlik] I suppose my strategy going into this is just to not talk about politics at all. If someone directly accused me of being a CIA agent, I'm not exactly sure how I'd handle it but I would probably just try to deflect it as much as possible and reassure them that I'm not a CIA agent. But there will be some distrust, I think. For an average citizen I don't think it's going to be difficult for an American being there but there certainly is, ya know, with everything that's been going on the last year, there's some tension between the United States and Russia, so that is something I might have to deal with and I'm not exactly sure how yet. - [Julia Julstrom-Agoyo] For my grant, this might be a little bit less of a problem in Malaysia than in Russia but I think throughout my travels I've never been accused of being a CIA agent but I've definitely come in contact with people who don't trust me or think because of my non-religion I'm like a witch or cases like that and so I think I've learned to handle them pretty well. I might, I mean as I presented, I do kind of want to get into politics but that's something I'm going to have to figure out as I am there and see what my place is as a Fulbrighter representing the US State Department and so that's a big reason that I may just end up focusing on deforestation rather than immigration, because everyone wants to save the environment but not everyone wants to save refugees. Not sure why but. - [Karen Wachsmuth] There's a question for all of you which is what do you plan to do upon your return to the US? I think one of the important things about Fulbright, since it's run by the Bureau of Cultural and Educational Affairs which is part of the Department of State, is that Fulbright is investing in these students and these students have had to articulate exactly the relationship between the Fulbright and what they plan to do and why the government should invest in them. - [Daniel Goering] First and foremost, after I return, I want to finish my dissertation. But I have to, this is something I've been thinking about actually, is how to use this experience to help address the issue that I discussed best and I think one way is through academic research. Another way, another avenue I'm exploring, is possibly books as well as ... I guess they call them think tanks. But getting more involved, kind of bridging academia and practice is something I hope to do. - [Karen Wachsmuth] And I think Daniel is being modest but I think that the problem of burnout and family/life balance is very much a problem that Japan and the US share, so the work that he does in Japan will, of course, flourish there and here. - [Julia Julstrom-Agoyo] Personally, I'm hoping to use my time in Malaysia to kind of figure out what my next steps are as a recent undergraduate. But a few ideas I have are persuading law school to do International Human Rights Law and that's a big reason why I do want to focus on those issues in Malaysia. And so that's an idea that I have but it's subject to change. But primarily I want to, in some way in my career, focus on solving mass atrocities like genocide and those kinds of crimes. - [Quinn Hejlik] Like Julia, I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to be doing afterwards. The plan has always been grad school for 20th century Russian history so I'll probably apply this year and hopefully be accepted but if I were, say, offered a job while in Russia and I could just stay there, I'll totally do that. So I'm not entirely sure, but yeah grad school is the plan right now. - [Daniel Goering] What if the job's with the CIA? - [Quinn Hejlik] I'll probably still take it. - [Karen Wachsmuth] One of the great changes recently for those of you who are familiar with the Fulbright program is there's now no limit to lifetime Fulbrights. So you can have as many Fulbrights in a lifetime as you can possibly be awarded so these two students can have an English Teaching Assistantship and then two years later can apply for a follow-up grant, Study/Research grant to go to that country or another country. Although probably they're a little too tired to be thinking about that right now. But also we have some faculty members, Fred Smith in, I believe he's in, both in Language and East Asian Religions, he's just gotten his third Fulbright award this year to go to India. So in a way this could be the beginning of a lifetime with Fulbright. Now there are some people in the audience who have some personal questions for Daniel and one of them is, do overworked mothers experience burnout and the second one is are you taking your family with you? - [Daniel Goering] Yes, overworked mothers do experience burnout. For sure, yep, absolutely. It's not exclusive, the phenomenon's not exclusive, to quote unquote working people because any mother knows that they work extremely hard. So yes, the answer is yes, absolutely. Is my family going with me? Yes they are. So it'll be my wife and our three kids. I joke and tell people we'll squeeze into a 300 square foot sweatbox in Tokyo for a year. We're looking forward to it. Actually my life motto is which means life's an adventure and so we're excited for this little family adventure as well. - [Karen Wachsmuth] If there are no other questions. Ah, there are. I believe this is another question for Daniel. The relationship of your work to that of Maslow. - [Daniel Goering] Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, right? Ask me afterwards. 'Cause that's kind of an academic question that I can't really give a short response to. But Maslow actually hasn't received a-- Ask me afterwards. It's a nuanced answer. - [Karen Wachsmuth] All right, well if there are no other questions. Thank you for these great questions. - [Sue Dulek] Quinn and Julia have already received our coveted, coveted mug. But Daniel has not. So on behalf of the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council please accept our thanks for your time today and our mug. - [Daniel Goering] Thanks. - [Sue Dulek] In addition to thanking the three speakers, again I want to thank our sponsors. The University of Iowa's International Programs, the University of Iowa's International Programs, and the Stanley UI Foundation as well as today's financial sponsors Burns Weston and US Bank. And again, we hope to see you back August 25th, the 2nd, and 9th. Depending on when you folks leave maybe we'll see you as well. So thank you very much.